Is the book of life a dictionary?

 Life —It’s Like. The Dictionary

What full of words  I don’t understand and can’t spell?—well that too.  No… you see  it happens that on the first of February  1884, the folks in England released the first volume (of 10) of the Oxford DicDictionary.  The modern Oxford  Dictionary  is up to about 30 volumes.  Now to be fair, you can access the said dictionary online and I believe there is still a CD ROM  version.  BTW the first version of the dictionary took about  30 years to complete and  was published in it’s “completed form in the late 1920’s.  The second edition was released  in 1989 and is commonly regarded as the primary dictionary of the English language.   

So… turning to our  theme for the day…

Life  is like a dictionary because. It takes a while  to complete.  We spend a good deal of time updating and completing.  Things that once had one meaning may now have two or three meanings.  Events like words have various meanings  even in a  single person’s mind and it gets more complex when  several people are engaged.  Let’s take a simple word… When  I was cleaning the floor in my office I found  a tiny screw.  Now many of you would swear I have  a screw loose somewhere—maybe it finally fell out.  It’s okay to use screws to put things together, yet if you do that wrong you screwed up (does that mean when you pull off something.really cool you screwed down?  Well… though I’m just sort of screwing around with this, it’s time to move forward before  you start thinking I can get screwed.   The point is that the  event that happened in one instance and in one context can morph  into other things. Over time and depending on your crowd  at the time and like the dictionary  it’s okay that one word can have various  implications.  

Picking Out Specifics

A reasonable estimate would put all the words  used in the 500+  entries in this blog at a total  approaching half a million.  Each one of these words is in  a dictionary somewhere (or at least a reference work somewhere.  In fact, the dictionary contains every great work of fiction or non-fiction.  So what distinguishes  the dictionary from War and Peace or The Cat in the Hat?  Well… it’s simple.  The dictionar tries to include everything while the author  of other things makes decisions about which words to leave in, leave out, and link together.  

So life can be like a dictionary, we are presented with all types of options, all types of  challenges, all types of people, food, etc.  As the author of our life we have to grab life and decide what to leave out, what to repeat, and what to define more fully as a matter of fact some words in the dictionary are given definition  after definition while others  get just the minimum. Attention and take  up hardly any  room.  

Seeking Peace and Joy In the Dictionary Life

So in seeking peace and joy… it’s important to  understand that  the same experience can mean different things at different times and to differing degrees  with different. People.  An important. Thing. To remember here is that we have choices regarding what things mean and how long we need these things to mean  what we want it to.  

Second seeking peace and joy will almost always  mean we are diving in, yet knowing that we will have to leave something’s out, repeat some lessons, and in the end we can understand  that once we fully engaged in an experience  we can move on.  If. We need to we can always get. Out the dictionary and try some  different. Words.  

More about. This soon.